IDEO’s partnership with Logitech is a case study in bringing together the power of imagination and the rigor of business.

As much as we love to lead with creativity, it’s difficult to develop a business plan off ideas alone. So when Logitech asked the IDEO team to investigate a broad array of possible futures and report back, we brought our findings to life by inventing a board game. Instead of a dry presentation on circular solutions, our designers created a story about a mouse that turned into a webcam.

That imagination mattered. It fueled an exploration into expertise we collected from researching with people already living in futures destined to expand. And our rigor helped us hold more possibilities, and identify intersectionalities. Combined, they redefined what it means for ideas to be viable in business; they focused us on long-term sustainability; and they pushed us past immediate technical feasibility to ask if new ideas would be feasible for entire systems.

Our partnership with Logitech revealed that imaginative dreaming and business rigor aren’t opposing forces, but rather complementary tools in opening up new directions into a future demanding bold decisions.

As of 2019, e-waste was the fastest-growing waste stream globally, and only 20% of the 48.5+ million tonnes is disposed of properly.

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Global emissions must be cut in half by 2030 to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

By 2030

Logitech has committed to becoming climate positive and removing more carbon than they create

Fast fashion keeps getting faster. But if the industry is to meet its climate commitments, its use of plastics has to slow down.

H&M chief executive Helena Helmersson set ambitious sustainability goals when she stepped into her role. She wanted to reduce the fashion giant’s impact on the environment and enable meaningful growth. But change is tough for any company, let alone one with eight brands operating across 74 markets. Together IDEO and the H&M Group created new plastic-free packaging, rallying around a more sustainable packaging solution that’s easily customizable.

By applying a design-led approach that went far beyond hiring a sustainability consultant, the H&M Group managed to reduce its use of plastic. But it didn’t stop there. A small team called Design Studio took what it learned and grew into an established strategic capability that pioneers new ways of working in the organization, tackling complex challenges in circularity, inclusion, supply chain, and customer experience. Sustainability isn’t a passing trend for H&M. It’s moving fashion forward.

Packaging accounts for 26% of plastics produced globally every year.

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Fashion e-commerce is estimated to grow by 10% annually through 2024, requiring even more packaging.

100M

plastic-free packages shipped in 2022

2,000 tons

of plastic eliminated from H&M operations

For children with physical disabilities and their families, mobility is freedom. But in Japan, there are barriers to that freedom of movement.

In raising a child with cerebral palsy, Yuri Matsumoto found that her son was separated from other kids during everyday activities. In Japan, children’s products are divided into two categories: those for children with disabilities and those for children without. Matsumoto aspired to close this gap with a product that would allow children of all abilities to use the same chair and be included in the same activities. To realize her idea, Matsumoto needed a strategic design company to refine the chair design, create a compelling visual identity, and arrive at a product road map to help set the business up for long-term success.

The result: a breakthrough product and supporting business that provides access for all kids, both for at-home activities like studying and eating, and also for family outings to restaurants, to the park, and to play with friends. Around the world, there are people like Matsumoto who see the need for better products in a very personal way. IDEO’s role is to help them realize their vision for a more inclusive future.

The Japanese health ministry categorizes 9.6 million people as disabled.
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In Japan, children with disabilities are largely excluded from mainstream classrooms. Government subsidized support chairs are designed for posture and stability. Their bulk and rigidity make venturing out with them challenging.
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Japanese children have fewer opportunities to learn about what it’s like to live with a disability than in the US.

Launched

officially in April 2022

5

restaurants and cafés in Tokyo are currently piloting the chair

There can be no growth for business if peoples’ basic needs aren’t met.

Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, CEO of Intercorp, came to IDEO with an audacious goal: to address the most fundamental needs of his country’s people and grow his business at the same time. He’d been introduced to IDEO while attending business school in the U.S. and explained that he waited until he had a challenge that felt big enough to knock on our door. Together we built a high-quality school system that would cost just $100 per month—affordable for the middle class. That project convinced Rodríguez-Pastor and his colleagues of the power of human-centered design. Our blended teams launched an innovation hub to introduce new ways of working with the conglomerate’s 90,000 employees. And as we collaborated with Intercorp’s businesses in finance, retail, health care, and education, we learned more about how to serve the everyday needs of Peruvian families. Somewhere along the way, the ultimate design project became the organization itself.

And while Rodríguez-Pastor’s company has grown dramatically, he’s not one to rest on laurels. Instead, the company is becoming more ambitious: upskilling the country’s workforce through an online platform, and fulfilling its climate strategy by investing in Peru’s green economy. (The coastal nation is the world’s third most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.) While the pandemic dealt a blow to Peru’s economy, Intercorp remains steadfast in its commitment to supporting businesses that help the middle class thrive.

Peru’s PISA score of educational quality has grown by 10% in the past decade but still ranks in the bottom 10 worldwide.

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In 2020, approximately 68% of the total employed population was in some form of informal employment—jobs that offered no protection and in which workers paid no taxes. Although that percentage decreased over the previous decade, Peru has one of the highest levels of informal employment in Latin America.

55,000

students enrolled across 68 locations in Peru, Mexico, and Colombia

2.5x

increase in revenue from $2.9 billion in 2011 to $8.5 billion in revenue in 2021

At these conferences, attendees are split up into group sessions: some big, some small, some on specific topics, and some designed to create new connections. Though grouping folks together might seem like a straightforward task, there is actually a dizzying number of ways to put people together—for one recent conference, the number in the neighborhood of 14 duodecillion possible combinations. That’s 1.4 x 10 to the 40th, which is close to the number you would get if you were to multiply the number of grains of sand on Earth by the number of stars in the universe.

Fortunately, for data scientists, sifting through haystacks to find needles is our bread and butter. We looked at this dataset with one goal: to create groups of individuals that foster conversations and catalyze new cross-disciplinary research. Easy, right?

We built an optimization algorithm that scores combinations of people based on diversity, trying to create well-mixed groups. To make sure we had truly excellent combinations, we needed to run the algorithm more than 1,000 times, after which a human had to examine the top scoring combinations. A human ultimately judging the top few options is crucial to making sure we incorporate nuances that the algorithm does not get. But at more than four minutes per algorithm run, it took an average of three days to get results. Three days! Three days between prototypes wasn’t going to cut it.

To solve our time problem, we turned to serverless computing. While we typically use it to deploy microservices, we couldn’t resist using it to massively scale our computational ability on the cheap. After all, we love hacking and repurposing things for atypical use cases, and digital tools are no different.

In a way, putting these groups together is like making chili—there are many different ways to make it, and all are valid (and many are tasty!). But to have a truly great chili, it’s essential that the ingredients are balanced and cooked properly to produce a dish that is elevated beyond the sum of its parts.

Think of each set of groups produced by the algorithm as a chili recipe. In the spirit of experimentation, you start putting together recipes that vary randomly in terms of ingredient amounts and cooking procedure. You’ve written down 1,000 recipes, and you’re going to cook and score them to find your ideal chili.

After a day of chopping, sautéing simmering, and tasting, you’ve only made 10 batches of chili. That's great, but in the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. So you think of ways you could cook and test your recipes more quickly. The most basic way is to make your cooking process (or code for your algorithm) more efficient: Chop faster and keep ingredients nearby. But this yields only a marginal gain. You would only crank out one or two more batches a day.

To really speed things up, you’re going to need some help. You could rent space in an industrial kitchen and hire chefs (servers on the cloud) who take a recipe, follow it exactly, and deliver the finished product to you. The downside: It takes a non-trivial amount of time and money to recruit and train chefs (much like setting up servers with the algorithm code).

But what if you had an army of 100 food trucks that are fully stocked, equipped, and happy to help you? That’s the equivalent of our serverless computing service. Serverless computing allows us to simply upload and then execute our algorithm code on cloud servers, taking away the hassle of setting up machines and allowing us to scale to hundreds or thousands of simultaneous runs effortlessly.

By using serverless tech, analyzing Scialog results goes from a process that runs in about three days to one that takes less than 10 minutes. With pricing schemes that only charge for the time the servers are being used, we can complete our thousand runs for less than $5.

This is great news, because it allows us to prototype our algorithms at scale much faster. What if, after looking at the results, we realize our scoring is missing a specific kind of input, like the balance of cat people vs. dog people? Previously that would necessitate another three-day wait for results. Now, we can tweak our algorithm, upload the new code, grab a cup of coffee (or chili), and come back to analyze the results.

We love the creative freedom that serverless computing enables (the ability to iterate on prototypes), and especially being able to get tons of computing power on demand—and cheaply.

If you’re interested in doing something similar, we’ve had great experiences using Zappa to deploy to AWS Lambda, but you can do the same kinds of things with other serverless services like Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions.

Now go forth and prototype at scale. And if you get hungry, you know what to do.

For almost 10 years, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement—or RSCA—has tapped IDEO for a little data science help. It's a good match, because RCSA shares our enthusiasm for helping people meet and collaborate. Every spring and fall, they organize conferences called Scialogs that bring together scientists of different disciplines to converse on important topics and inspire further collaboration through grants.

Six months ago, Dawn announced she’d step down from Planned Parenthood, having successfully helped transition the organization from the leadership of long-time president, Cecile Richards. Instead of hurling herself straight into leading at another large organization, Dawn decided to dedicate a year to experimentation and discovery as expert-in-residence at IDEO.

Dawn is now working with teams across IDEO and IDEO.org to find new ways to catalyze change. In particular, she wants to uncover how best to use data and technology to improve service delivery and support movement-building. Coming to IDEO, she says, “I saw an opportunity to ask, How do we use human-centered design principles, entrepreneurship, and data and technology to transform how we are reaching people and working alongside them?”

Not one to be daunted by ambitious goals, the first official project Dawn is helping to launch is The Billion Girls CoLab—an initiative aimed at harnessing new coalitions and diverse expertise to develop innovative solutions that will support young women’s power and health worldwide. This joint effort between IDEO.org and IDEO CoLab will bring together cross-sector collaborators to think about reproductive health in new ways. Dawn sees this work as a chance to create impact at scale, but also as a means to continue empowering others to become leaders.

“I think established leaders are afraid to leave their roles and what they know,” Dawn reflected recently. “But if we're talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, some of us who have been privileged to lead—especially as leaders of a certain age—have a real opportunity to move and make space and build up a cadre of new leaders. They need room to lead.” It can be scary, she acknowledges, “but you just have to say to yourself, ‘Well, I'm going to step off this diving board into the unknown, and what can I report back from the other side?’”

Dawn sat down with Whitney Mortimer, IDEO CMO and partner, to talk about what the other side is like, how her perspectives on creative leadership are evolving, and what she hopes to build in the near term to support a healthy, empowered generation of future leaders.

Whitney: Let’s begin with the work you’re doing with CoLab, where you’ve been deeply immersed. You’ve said that the CoLab model, which brings disparate groups and experts together to collaboratively solve problems, aligns well with your vision of how to work better on women’s health.

Dawn: We’re building a cohort that is not just people in the sexual and reproductive health field, but also others who are thinking about adolescent girls from very different perspectives and industries, including the for-profit corporations. The idea is a cohort that is domestic and global, which is something kind of new for the sexual and reproductive health ecosystem. We’re trying to catalyze a very different kind of conversation and output, researching and designing in close collaboration and asking what would it look like to build something that unlocks the power of a billion girls who are coming to adolescence around the globe over the coming decade? And what would that change for our world?

[When I was at Planned Parenthood], as much as we all tried to promote that kind of ‘fail-fast’ culture, we mostly lived in a fail-never culture, because the stakes were so high. And yet we know we’re going to have to experiment some to figure out what is going to catapult us to the next level.

Whitney: How is this approach to work different from how you were working before?

Dawn: I have to constantly remind myself, it's only been six months since I left [Planned Parenthood]. I really had to learn to live without a grenade as my metronome. Our days were so driven by constant distractions and firefights, even though I feel like we made real progress and built real things. So now [at IDEO] I’m gaining a different way to approach problems—to step back and have time to be more thoughtful. I'm more convinced than ever that this is not just a narrow fight. We now clearly have a global set of forces at play.

Whitney: You've always been clear with everybody that what got us here won't save us—we have to be looking ahead to the next thing. You're sitting on that horizon now, asking how does technology and everything we're learning about healthcare play out in a world that has such unequal access? As a creative leader, what do you need? What helps you shape something completely new, as opposed to just wanting to fall back into the matrix of an organization that already exists and will tell you what its priorities are every single minute of every day?

Dawn: Many people called me in the days after I announced and said, ‘Hey, do you want to apply for this job? Can we put you forward for that?’ They were all amazing opportunities, many in the progressive health and rights arena. It was hard to resist going to another similar operation, because of the urgency and the real difference that those organizations are making in this moment. But that urgency can get in the way of stepping back and thinking differently about how to work most effectively. [When I was at Planned Parenthood], as much as we all tried to promote that kind of ‘fail-fast’ culture, we mostly lived in a fail-never culture, because the stakes were so high. And yet we know we’re going to have to experiment some to figure out what is going to catapult us to the next level.

Whitney: Something that you do very naturally and fluidly, is you find analogous examples out in the world that makes sense inside your world. I'm wondering, as you look at scaling something new, what other kinds of methods or mindsets from the designer's toolkit are you able to tap into?

Dawn: There are just these amazing ways to step back and actually use a designer’s approach to think about how companies, organizations, movements could actually be building and thinking more about the early and upstream inputs to get the outputs we want to see later.

With a designer’s mindset, we would ask how to more thoughtfully shape the waves of cultural nurture that will carry these generations to the shores of the future.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about nature versus nurture. And then I jumped to this bigger idea with the folks at IDEO, thinking about the idea of cultural nurture: What larger cultural wave was I riding that I couldn't see then, but which shaped me—and not just me, but a generation of people?

For example, when I was in third grade, I started a student council because the playground rules were unfair to girls. Exactly around that same time was when Title IX passed. All of a sudden there was a mandate for equality in education—in sports in particular—for girls. I benefited from that immediately but I could not see the profound impact it would have. I would have been radically different had I not been told, “You get to play basketball. You get to run for whatever school office.”

I think about how powerful those forces are, and yet we don't respond to them and leverage them as well as we could. With a designer’s mindset, we would ask how to more thoughtfully shape the waves of cultural nurture that will carry these generations to the shores of the future.

Whitney: Can you see those moments now that are shaping the next generation?

Dawn: I'm thinking about it a lot around the climate and depletion of the planet, with younger people getting messages both of fear, and also of preciousness. We're also looking at stigma. There is a lot of exciting shame-busting going on in the culture right now, which of course is why I think there's so much pushback in our politics.

Whitney: How has your identity and orientation as a leader shifted? How does that alter your sense of your capacity and what you need in order to have the impact you want to see?

Dawn: As they say in IDEO fashion, I'm diverging before converging. What I have tried to do is not converge on a solution or direction too quickly, because by nature that would be what I’d do—solve the problem as quickly as possible. In my previous life you could not sit around and admire the problem for very long. But I’m learning to be in love with the problem for a bit longer. I’m asking, can data and technology unlock a different paradigm of care? Is it stigma or rights or both that are foundational to solving the problem of abortion access? And what is it that I’m best equipped to do and help lead people toward?

Whitney: When you were at Planned Parenthood, you were early to see the potential, say, to use VR as an engagement and empathy-building tool. What technologies are you seeing as most critical and exciting now, as you're exploring what will be the new paradigm for reproductive health and healthcare?

Dawn: Well, I know augmented intelligence is the phrase of the year, but it really does have amazing potential. For example, take the idea of personalized prescribing and apply that to contraception. We know contraception is a game-changer, a life-changer, a life-saver. But we also know that when people get hormonal contraception, some people are going to have side effects. That means they’re either not going to keep using it or they’re going to want to switch. And that’s when there is more risk of getting pregnant. Imagine if we could harness AI to look across all of the prescription data sets and provide doctors with the tools to better match individuals with the product or formulation that suits them best. What if you could, by orders of magnitude, improve the ability of women to get a prescription or method of their choice that works for them right from the get go? That’s one example of how we might use new capabilities to create impact at scale.

Whitney: With the political climate being what it is, and an election on the horizon with unknown outcomes, how do you think about the challenge of something like improving access to and adherence to contraception or of empowering a billion girls around the world, irrespective of what may happen politically in the US and elsewhere?

Dawn: The one thing I 100% believe is you can’t think of anything completely outside of politics. It's just so clear what a powerful shaping force politics and government policy are. At the same time, there is a narrowness to the political lens. And when you start to think of these other actors and other ecosystems, you realize there's a lot that is possible—there’s potential to organize, to employ tools we're not fully utilizing. Part of what I want to do now is build out the progressive toolbox so that we're able to better work over or under or around the political obstacles, even while we recognize they cannot be ignored. The CoLab model has a lot to offer in leveraging many sectors and approaches and drawing them together to power solutions.

Whitney: What is the role of brand in that scenario?

Dawn: I actually think it is very important—not to create a name or brand a product, not that kind of thing—but the idea that we could use the principles of brand to communicate the power of girls to change the world. The idea that we can impress upon people the importance of raising up generations of girls, giving them the tools and the freedom to make their mark. That, I think, is something we need to capture and tell to the world.

We have to do everything we can to connect girls and to empower them and to make room for them. We have to get over some of our false distinctions and start to help them see that there’s a kind of global sisterhood that’s powerful, and that they have the opportunity to save the planet. That’s the small task we're going to hand off to them.

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When Dawn Laguens looks back on her eight years leading brand and public strategy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she describes a typical work day as “catch grenade, throw grenade back, run two steps forward.” To be sure, the years from 2010-2018 were eventful for everyone, and particularly for people like Dawn, who were on the front lines of vicious political conflicts, while simultaneously doing the daily work of advocating for accessible and effective healthcare solutions for women worldwide.

Spring in London vibrates with the tweeting of birds and the drilling of construction excavators. It’s a surreal symphony of nature and gentrification.

I was late for work and speeding up my usual way when I got detoured by a few meters of plastic barrier. As I walked around the construction equipment, I heard one worker shout to another.

"I'll pick up my gloves and be right back," he said. He walked by me and leaned towards a hole in the temporary barrier where his gloves were neatly stored.

"Excuse me," I started with my typical nosey flair. "Why do you keep your gloves in there?" He must have a locker, I thought to myself, or even a pocket where to store them on site.

"I work on different areas of the site,” he said, “and I need different gloves based on the job. These barriers crack very easily, so they provide the perfect storage space when I need it and where I need it."

As I looked at his hiding spot, I thought about designing for the end of life of products, like construction barriers, mailboxes, and or a simple shoebox. It was the first time I considered the new use cases that can come from deterioration and change.

As he walked away, he smiled tightly; I had acknowledged his hidden creative side.

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Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

1. What a Computer Learns From Watching Hours of Cartoons

Find out what happened when an IDEO CoLab designer tried training a neural network to generate its own cartoons—and what he learned about the danger of bias in training data. Read the story!

2. Inviting Algorithms to the Design Team

Your future design partner may be an algorithm. Here’s what emerged from an experimental collaboration between a graphic designer, a data scientist, and an algorithm. Read the story!

3. To Design a Better Future, Embrace the Uncomfortable

How can we explore the future of technology? By prototyping it. Check out the 5 near-future concepts that came out of a new IDEO exploration called The Discomfort Zone. Read the story!

4. No Beards Allowed: Exploring Bias in Facial Recognition AI

One IDEO designer created a facial recognition AI game that helps users understand how machine learning models are trained—and subtly hints at the areas where bias could creep in. Read the story!

5. We Built a Bot to Assign Parking Spots. It Fought Back.

When IDEO Cambridge moved into a new studio with a too-small parking lot, they built a bot to manage traffic... but the bot fought back. Here’s what this rogue AI taught the team about “raising” a bot—and how they tamed it. Read the story!

Bonus: Check out the follow-up post where a design researcher explores how his colleagues' interactions with the bot signaled shifts in studio culture.

6. Training a Computer to Find Shapes in the Clouds

The average 25-to-34-year-old only spends 13 minutes a day relaxing. Here’s what happened when one IDEO intern tried "outsourcing" some of her leisure time to a computer. Read the story!

7. What the AI Products of Tomorrow Might Look Like

How can designers leverage the power of AI to build a better future? To explore this question, we created an award-winning speculative design exhibition called HyperHuman. Read the story!

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As designers, we help build the future we want to see. So when a new technology emerges, we're always eager to take it for a test run, push its edges, and see how it fits into visions of the future. When it comes to AI, the opportunities are endless, but the stakes are high—our work can have serious implications that affect the lives of real people at unprecedented scale. Designers at IDEO are constantly working on cutting-edge experiments that explore the possibilities—and potential pitfalls—of a future where humans and machines are ever more entangled. Read on to explore a few of those experiments and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.